A (slightly edited) passage from Lindsay Bremner’s draft for “Citiness as Literariness” [PDF]. Found via Networked_Performance.
The city asserts its otherness in a number of ways.
Firstly, it exposes us to an excessive presence of others, of strangers, who call into question our ownership of the world.
Second…the city annihilates authorship. It is most certainly a made artifact, yet by whom? The very multiplicity of agency at work in it means firstly that it is not made by any one. In other words, it is made by no one, which is the same as to say by every one. Urban life is constantly made and unmade by multiple realities, and authorship, no matter how prominent, quickly disappears into obscurity, anonymity or cultural history. The city erases authorship for itself.
Thirdly, like the work of literature, the city brings its authors / writers into existence, not the other way round.
More information on Lindsay Bremner’s appearance in Slought Foundation’s Architecture Dejeuner Series may be found here.
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